Ranked: Which Foods Use the Most Land?

Key Takeaways

• Lamb and mutton top the ranking at about 1,806 square feet of land per pound, followed by beef from beef herds at 1,593 square feet.
• Dark chocolate ranks fourth, requiring more land per pound than beef sourced from dairy herds.
• Lamb and mutton require roughly 96 times as much land per pound as wheat and rye, the lowest-ranked food in the dataset.

Producing food requires land for crops, livestock grazing, and animal feed, but the amount needed varies dramatically by food type.

This visualization ranks 15 foods by the amount of land required to produce one pound of product. The data for this graphic comes from Poore & Nemecek (2018), with the data processed by Our World in Data.

Read the full article here.